Designer: Juan Pablo CambariereLocation: Buenos Aires, Argentina
Typefaces: Clarendon and Rosewood.
I studied for two undergraduate degrees, Fine Arts and Graphic Design. Since 1997 I’ve been in charge of designing NO, a weekly section of the national newspaper Página 12. The covers I designed garnered some media attention, and a publisher called me about doing some book covers for Suadamericana /Random House Mondadori. Working for a newspaper gives me unique on the job training, as I’m forced to meet fixed deadlines everyday. I rarely have more than three hours to develop the cover, from discussing the idea to the final piece. After this experience, designing books covers was extremely pleasant, especially because of the time frames—from one week to a complete month to develope each project!
Mostly (this two examples) Sudamericana /Ramdom House Mondadori and also La Bestia Equilátera, a small publisher from Buenos Aires.
Publishing books is not the most lucrative business in Argentina, so most of the time you get a lot of working freedom, a great enviroment, but no money to buy pictures or pay photographers or illustrators. The cassette picture for Vida de Vivos (Lived Lives) is mine: it´s a very simple photo I captured in my studio, with a good (but not professional) Sony camera in automatic mode. The Images for The Alexandria Quartet are just scans of sections of Egyptians bills.
Honnestly, there was almost no process in these two examples. Those are the first ideas that came to me the very first time the editors told me about those books. It's not that it always happens to me this way, but in this case it did; it´s probably not an entirely healthy habit I have developed from working on a newspaper. Always on a rush!
Of course, I always work with the editor of the book, discussing ideas and strategies. In both Sudamericana and LBE we also work a lot with the publishers, directors Pablo Aveluto and Natalia Meta respectively. In Sudamericana I also work a lot with the Art Director Lucrecia Rampoldi.
Vida de Vivos: If you ever visit a newspaper’s headquarters, you will see that most of the journalists have their desktop drawers full of old tapes with old interviews, a lot of them unlabeled. I thought one of these tapes was a perfect representation of this book: the old, raw, uncensored, unedited interview lost in the back of a drawer. Also both cover/backcover effect represent transparency, or some kind of basic truth through both objects: cassette and book.
The Alexandria Quartet: It's basically an allegorical illustration of the places and the moments that Durrell worked with using bills. These bills have a totally different meaning when seen by Argentinean eyes than by the egyptians that actually used them as currency, and thats the meaning we are looking for.
My work is strongly marked by my master, Alejandro Ros, probably the greatest contemporary Argentinean designer. Also by two brillant book designers, Sergio Manela from Argentina and the Daniel Gil from Spain.
Despite my beloved wife's annoyance, sometimes I can make use of all the junk I have accumulated through all these years.
We asked Juan Pablo to show us any solutions that led to the final solutions in Vida de Vivos and The Alexandria Quartet, and instead, we got even luckier: images showing the process for several other excellent projects. Be sure to click through them all!
11.2.09 // Ricardo Cordoba said:
Great post! However, to have a better understanding of the comps and covers shown here, I think that it's important to know the titles of the books, or their content, so that we're not simply looking at pretty pictures. Apart from "The Alexandria Quartet," which is mentioned in the caption, most of the other titles shown might be hard to decipher for an English-speaking audience.
So, at the risk of stating the obvious, I've listed those books below, in the order of their appearance:
A. "Vida de Vivos" is an anthology of interviews, spanning several years, by journalist María Moreno
B. The three books that appear as "Other titles designed by Cambariere" are:
1. "The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind" (Marvin Minsky)
2. One of the obvious ones: "The Camel" (Lord Berners)
3. A rough translation of this one (by Jéssica Fainsod) might be: "Our Maid Left and My Life Is a Shambles: A Housekeeping Manual"
C. The four projects shown below the subhead "More of Cambariere's work" are as follows:
1. "Aiding and Abetting" (comps) (Muriel Spark)
2. "The Emotion Machine...," once again (comps) (Marvin Minsky)
3. "The Camel" (comps) (Lord Berners)
4. This one also might be obvious: "Poor People" (comps) (William Vollmann)